Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems protect content against unauthorized distribution. Electronic documents, video, music, and books are common types of content that may be protected by a DRM system. DRM systems may provide features, such as anti-copying features, time based expiration, and other limits on the use of the content.
There are currently a large number of DRM systems and associated formats, which are available to content providers and users. These DRM systems and formats often use one or more proprietary client applications, such as a media player, so that the user can download, play, or view the content.
Unfortunately, the known DRM systems use proprietary licenses and formats for packaging the content. In turn, these proprietary DRM packages require a corresponding proprietary DRM client that must be downloaded in order to render the content. As a result, a DRM client is often incompatible with the DRM licenses and packages from a different DRM system. Therefore, users must typically support a large number of DRM clients and software for proprietary DRM formats. This makes it difficult and inconvenient for a user to obtain and manage content protected by the large number of known DRM systems.
It would therefore be desirable to provide users the ability to download and use protected content based on a flexible DRM client that is capable of handling multiple DRM formats. It may also be desirable to provide protected content to a user in a fashion that is transparent to the user and the content provider.